VOGONS


Reply 40 of 55, by NJRoadfan

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The closest replacement for the floppy was likely the Zip disk. It had enough installed base and the OEM agreements to include drives were in place with a few manufacturers. What killed it was the reliability, and the timing couldn't have been worse as it was just when the cost of CD recording dropped down to practically nothing in 2000 or so. The market always wanted CD-Rs purely because of the installed base of players.

MiniDisc never had a chance because of Sony stupidness. Their insistance on ATRAC encoding for music and forcing people to use that buggy SonicStage software (more DRM crippling) ensured that it would never become mainstream against dirt cheap MP3 CD players (just burn some files to CD and go).

Reply 41 of 55, by retrofanatic

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snorg wrote:

But yes, I agree, if MD had the money poured into it that other technologies did, it would have been more competitive. I am sure Sony must have had some role in killing it, they probably charged high licensing fees to other companies that wanted to make it, I don't think I ever saw non-Sony branded MD gear (but could be wrong here, it has been so long).

Ya there has been many Japanese ones like AIWA and SHARP for hardware and many others like TDK and maxell for MD media, but you're right I believe...they (SONY) probably would have charged super high licensing fees. Again, I think in the end though it came down to the physical cost for the actual media and hardware. A typical CD-ROM of yesteryear were already poplular and goofy 5" CD's were already established and did not require an extra plastic casing (which added more cost to produce from the get go).

snorg wrote:

There was a narrow window where hard disk based MP3 players were in the 300-400 and up range that an affordable MD player that was also convenient to use would have captured a big portion of the market.
I still think there is a role for offline media, but these days we seem to be moving towards curated "app store" type experiences. I really like GOG and need to download all my games just in case they go offline, I don't think they or Steam are going to go out of business any time soon but GOG is a little more friendly to the consumer, if that ever were to happen (provided you downloaded everything first, the lack of DRM is highly appealing). With Steam you would be a little worse off, some things would not run well without it although I hope that if they ever went out of business they would release your library to you.

Just my opinion, but I just cannot stand any online "app store" crap. I just try to find the actual original disc for every game I have and back it up on physical media that I own...so i can have it forever 🤣 (or at least give me the illusion that I will have it forever 🤣 )

Reply 42 of 55, by Unknown_K

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I like the old 5.25" MO disks and drives. Many years ago I snagged a huge lot of the MO disks and one drive while looking for some old 68K Mac parts and have purchased a bunch more drives for my old PCs. Seems like MO drives were used mostly on old Macs especially in the graphics world. Recently I snagged a huge 16 disk 5.25" MO jukebox and it is sitting in my basement until I get around to finding a permanent spot for it (freaking huge). The arm that moves the carts also has to flip them over (1.3GB, 650MB per side). The disks themselves will outlive me.

Before MO there were WORM drives, I have a few for my old IBM PS/2 systems (IBM model 3363). Two units are mounted in a couple Model 80's and I have an external one as well (connects to a 486 system using a special ISA card). I think they are only a couple hundred MB each, single sided.

Then you have the zip/jaz drives and before them the SyQuest 5.25" carts and Bernouli drives. Have a bunch of those in use on old gear.

You can build quite a collection of removable media drives, and even more if you include all the old tape formats.

Collector of old computers, hardware, and software

Reply 43 of 55, by Kodai

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rodimus80 wrote:

Around 1998-1999 I was working tech support for Iomega. I thank all that is good in this world for that evil to have been abandoned. Hearing the words Zip Drive and Jaz Drive still send shivers down my spine.

Hey, at least you didn't have to work with SparQ drives. So much better than the Jaz, and cheaper too. But then when the failed (which was about 50% of the units I think), you had to deal with a wonderful nails scratching the chalkboard sound and you instantly knew that the head was scrapping off the media from your disk and leaving a cute little dreamcast symbol on the top of it. Or maybe it was the golden spiral, who knows. I worked at a medical research lab in the IT department back then and half of our SparQ's up and died while taking their disks (and of course the data) with them in the first few months we had them. Then SyQuest closed shop on us. As silly as it sounded I was kinda scared to get in front of one of them because the screeching made it sound like it was going at a couple thousand RPM. That made me think of a wonderful moment I had with an old iomega device back in the late 80's when I was in high school. My dad and I had managed to snag a few brand new 44MB Bernoulli boxes and a dozen disks for about $200. I was happily playing Space Quest 3 one summer night and for some reason I heard this roar come from the Bernoulli box. It got louder and louder and in a few seconds, it sounded like an actual engine was in the room. I started to reach over and turn it off, but the thing made a loud bang and jumped up. Next thing I saw was 44mb disk parts shooting across the room like Johnny Bench throwing to first base. My dad came in the room cause he thought I was destroying the computer for some reason. Saw me sitting there with this dumb founded look on my face and asked what the hell I was doing. All I could think to say was the Bernoulli box tried to kill me cause it hated Roger Wilco. I think I stepped on broken, sharp bits of that drive and its disk for the next two years (just couldn't get them out of that carpet). Needless to say we sold the rest of the drives and disks but fast. Then we tried a WORM drive with a cheap, Korean made ( as I can still remember the "Made in Korea" sticker half burned off the board), fast SCSI interface and it actually caught fire (the interface not the drive), which of course released the magic smoke from the computer so it would never work again. Shame really as it was a really cool Wang 286 with a neat LCD screen going across the from of the computer that would tell you the date and time or even a little welcome message. I had a few other mishaps from the late 80's to mid 90's with those sort of external secondary/backup drives, but none attacked me like the iomega box. I hate iomega, 🤣.

Reply 44 of 55, by lolo799

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I have two of those SparQ drives, a parallel and an internal IDE.
I bought the parallel a few months before SyQuest closure, it still works I think.
The IDE drive has the infamous problem, it scratches disk wich then can break working drives and so on..., I don't know if I'll dare to retry it someday, even if I have a dozen sealed disks.

Anyone remembers the Iomega Click devices?

PCMCIA Sound, Storage & Graphics

Reply 45 of 55, by Kerr Avon

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I agree that CD/DVDs aren't as ideal as we were led to believe - I have a lot of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs dating back from the late 90s (just CD-Rs for the first few years, obviously) that I used as system and data backups, since we were led to believe that (if properly looked after) this media would last a lifetime. Yeah right. Many of the discs are temperamental to impossible to read now*, even though they've been stored in a dry place, in seperate cases, in darknesss. Some of the earliest CD-Rs can't even be recognised as a disc in any of the drives on any of my PCs!

USB sticks, on the other hand, are fantastic. Not only are they much more reliable and resilient than optical discs, but they of course can be written to, to, and can even have special hardware included to encrypt the data (I've never used this feature, but it's brilliant for anyone who wants it).

* When I say 'now', I mean five or so years back, as that's when I realised how bad the situation is (for the first time in years, maybe since I'd made them, I went checking through some very old CD-Rs for some scripts for someone (and I would have verified the CD-Rs when I burnt them, so they weren't created flawed) and found out that my 'lifetime' backups of data were so unreliable), and stopped using optical disc media for long term backups. I know use external hard drives for backup, and USB sticks as a double backup for stuff I really wouldn't want to lose.

Reply 46 of 55, by Kerr Avon

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Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I'm glad media in general are on the way out. Downloading and storing is what I like. Hence my passion for Steam and GOG.com.

Yes and no. For the PC yes (especially the brilliant GOG, as I hate DRM), but for consoles not so much, as (a) with a PC you can always add a new hard drive or replace an older drive, so you can have every downloadable game you own on your machine at once, but with a console you can't add a second drive, and frequently you can't replace with a larger drive (or if you can it's too expensive), so you have to delete and re-download your games every so often, which is a real nuisance if your download speed is slow, or you have a low monthly data cap, and (b) on consoles the downloadable games often have stringent ties to one machine or account, so if your console dies or gets stolen then it can be troublesome to get the games tied instead to your new console, and (c) Microsoft have already proven that they will completely close down online access to a console when it's a few years past it's commercial lifetime, so in say five years time it might well be impossible for me to plug in a new (or even my existing) XBox 360 and download a game that I've paid for now, as the 360's online access will probably have been terminated for ever by then, as has already happened (two or three years back) for the original XBox.

Oh, and with Valve and GOG you get games sales, whereas with console downloadable games you get much less in the way of reduced costs, especially with Microsoft, where the XBox downloadable games can cost a lot more (even full price!) than the used, or even new, retail copy of the same game.

In my view:

PC downloadable games = convenience and saving money,

Console downloadable games = lots of potential problems and can actually cost more money than getting the games on a disc from a bricks and mortar shop.

Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I decry optical discs for being so unreliable in the above post, but praise discs in this post, I should point out that it's writeable discs (CD-R and DVD-R) I've had the problems with. I have five consoles that use discs (PS2, Gamecube, original XBox, XBox 360, and PS3) plus all the games I've bought on PC discs, and all of the movie DVDs and audio CDs I've bought, and have very rarely had any problems with these (I think I remember one audio CD and one (XBox 360) game, and there were probably more, but I don't recall offhand). Basically, commercial discs have been mostly very reliable in my experience, whereas home burnt discs are much less so (and the people I've mentioned this mostly concur, although lots of people say game discs are less reliable, but I do wonder how much of that is due to user neglect, as I know a lot of people keep their game discs out of the case and on the carpet or thrown casually into a desk drawer or TV cupboard.

Reply 47 of 55, by Firtasik

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Sadly, Steam and GOG don't have much respect for the CD-DA. They should provide lossless tracks. Oh, there's Quake (+ other titles) whitout music on Steam. Are they serious?!

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Reply 48 of 55, by ncmark

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Personally I have never had a problem with CD-R disks. I have burned hundreds and only can think of one that ever went bad. I have some I recorded 15+ years ago and still scan with no more errors than a newly burned disk.

DVD-R disks on the other hand are another story. They seem to be much more variable in quality and I have had some go bad. Still, I think quality disks (translation: Japanese-made) degrade very little.

I am sure people would disagree with me - but I would NOT trust external disks. Sure they are convenient - just plug it in and you can access all your data without swapping disks. But as a backup? No way. One failure of the electronics, loss of a critical sector such as those used to store the FAT, and the entire drive is gone. Not to mention the fact that unless you keep a running tab of the number of files on the disk, you could delete files and never realize it until later.

Reply 49 of 55, by retrofanatic

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ncmark wrote:

Personally I have never had a problem with CD-R disks. I have burned hundreds and only can think of one that ever went bad. I have some I recorded 15+ years ago and still scan with no more errors than a newly burned disk.

DVD-R disks on the other hand are another story. They seem to be much more variable in quality and I have had some go bad. Still, I think quality disks (translation: Japanese-made) degrade very little.

I am sure people would disagree with me - but I would NOT trust external disks. Sure they are convenient - just plug it in and you can access all your data without swapping disks. But as a backup? No way. One failure of the electronics, loss of a critical sector such as those used to store the FAT, and the entire drive is gone. Not to mention the fact that unless you keep a running tab of the number of files on the disk, you could delete files and never realize it until later.

I totally agree. I backup everything and catalogue everything even though I have multiple external HDD's. I just never trust any hard drive to last.

Reply 50 of 55, by Kodai

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I had a whole stack of a 100 5" cd-r's go bad on me once and a whole stack of 100 little 3" cd-r's as well. But that's after maybe a couple thousand disks from the past 15 years. Never had any DVD's crap out on me. I've had a number of flash drives die and maybe 25-35 personal HDD's die over the decades. Only the hardware gods know how many HDD's in total I've seen dead in my lifetime. It has to be in multiple thousands at this point.

On a side note, even though I quite smoking back in '07 I still have my old full height Tandon 5MB xenix drive (yes, 5 Mega Bytes) that I used as an ashtray for 20+ years. Still has the platters in it. 😄

Reply 51 of 55, by obobskivich

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snorg wrote:

I will say that I've got a legit copy of bio shock 2 via Steam but it's such a pain in the ass to deal with the Games for Window Live BS that I don't bother with it. I can never remember the password for an account I don't use, 🤣. I think the only other games I have that use it are Shadowrun (Microsoft version, not the new one) and Fallout 3? I'm not sure why Fallout 3 would need it since there is no online or multiplayer component to that game. Makes it a pain to try and play. I think there must have been a copy without it, maybe that's only the Steam one that has it?

Looking at that spec sheet for MD data, maybe it's a good thing it didn't succeed, they list it as having a 500ms seek time. I think CD is faster than that.

The combo of GFWL and Steam is what ruined BioShock 2 for me, and others that I've talked to. I'm not familiar with Shadowrun, but Fallout 3 includes GFWL because they originally intended to distribute the DLCs via GFWL (the first one, Operation Anchorage, was originally available only via GFWL), but GFWL ran into problems getting the DLCs installed in the right place for the game to use them - especially if a player had opted out of using it and then bought the DLC, because the save-games that they generated weren't "seen" by GFWL, but GFWL wouldn't drop the DLC files into the game's directories - so you either had to restart the game with GFWL enabled (a huge pain), or find where it downloaded the DLCs to and move them manually.

There's also a free mod that removes GFWL from Fallout 3's menus and start-up, and prevents the above issue with DLCs from ever happening - here:
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/1086/?

I highly suggest it. And it does make the game start-up much faster, as claimed. 😀

Reply 52 of 55, by snorg

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obobskivich wrote:
The combo of GFWL and Steam is what ruined BioShock 2 for me, and others that I've talked to. I'm not familiar with Shadowrun, b […]
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snorg wrote:

I will say that I've got a legit copy of bio shock 2 via Steam but it's such a pain in the ass to deal with the Games for Window Live BS that I don't bother with it. I can never remember the password for an account I don't use, 🤣. I think the only other games I have that use it are Shadowrun (Microsoft version, not the new one) and Fallout 3? I'm not sure why Fallout 3 would need it since there is no online or multiplayer component to that game. Makes it a pain to try and play. I think there must have been a copy without it, maybe that's only the Steam one that has it?

Looking at that spec sheet for MD data, maybe it's a good thing it didn't succeed, they list it as having a 500ms seek time. I think CD is faster than that.

The combo of GFWL and Steam is what ruined BioShock 2 for me, and others that I've talked to. I'm not familiar with Shadowrun, but Fallout 3 includes GFWL because they originally intended to distribute the DLCs via GFWL (the first one, Operation Anchorage, was originally available only via GFWL), but GFWL ran into problems getting the DLCs installed in the right place for the game to use them - especially if a player had opted out of using it and then bought the DLC, because the save-games that they generated weren't "seen" by GFWL, but GFWL wouldn't drop the DLC files into the game's directories - so you either had to restart the game with GFWL enabled (a huge pain), or find where it downloaded the DLCs to and move them manually.

There's also a free mod that removes GFWL from Fallout 3's menus and start-up, and prevents the above issue with DLCs from ever happening - here:
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/1086/?

I highly suggest it. And it does make the game start-up much faster, as claimed. 😀

Oh thank you thank you I loathe GFWL.

Reply 53 of 55, by nforce4max

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This is why some resort to piracy in the first place, no one wants to buy and deal with all the excess drm protection that ruins the experience. Plus there is always someone out there that finds breaking any protection just for the challenge of doing it. Last but not least nothing is forever and one day all that we take for granted will be gone as the case throughout history.

No Steam cracks for the lols....

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 54 of 55, by Gemini000

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BTW: For anyone who hasn't heard: GFWL is on its deathbed! :D

While the fate of a few games is still a mystery at this time, Capcom is one of the companies who was using GFWL who's making an effort to patch up the games they've made that uses it to get rid of it.

I only own one GFWL game, Super Street Fighter IV, and it's one of the ones that's confirmed to be getting GFWL removed. :B

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- Pixelmusement Website: www.pixelships.com
--- Ancient DOS Games Webshow: www.pixelships.com/adg

Reply 55 of 55, by valnar

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As it was said before, USB flash drives are probably the closest thing we have that's ubiquitous. Most modern motherboards have BIOS support for booting, and they come in a variety of sizes. 2GB drives (already 3x the capacity of a CD) are so common, that they are given away in many IT conferences or other settings since they can be branded easily. The problem is long lasting data integrity, but that was true of floppy and ZIP disks too. High-quality CDR's and DVD-R's can last decades, but that's a side-affect of their write-once capability. That adds to their longevity.

What I never liked about the CD-ROM was it introduced the inability to record even the slightest bit of data to it upon first use. When you bought a game or program on floppy disks, it could record info about your first install, like serial number or agreement. You didn't have to go through that again. I don't know if anyone remembers that, since the way CD's work now is so common, but the idea of having to put in the key code EVERY TIME you installed it was not common place in the 90's.